Semanal: Post One Video Per Week for all of 2008

The few of you who actually follow my videoblog might have noticed I’ve been posting more video lately. There’s a reason for that… I’ve gone insane! No… seriously, it’s because I’m participating in something called Semanal. What’s that? From the Semanal website:
“Semanal is an open project where you post one video a week. You can [...]

A Better Experience Begins with Staff

From the MSN Money site (via Steven M. Cohen’s Shared Items in Google): “This unique in-store education event signals the company’s focus on transforming the Starbucks Experience for both customers and partners. Starbucks hopes any customers inconvenienced by the early closures will see this as an investment that will have long term benefits. For their [...]

IL2007, Day 2: Encouraging and Building your Techie Team

Michael Stephens and Sarah Houghton-Jan
Building your techie team: tips for training staff - they were creative - this presentation was built around the word “experiment:”
Engage - use real world examples, stay relevant, highlight tips and tricks
Xenagogue - become a guide through a strange land, be available and accessible, encourage student independence
Play - encourage exploration, allow [...]

IL2007, Day 2: Promoting Play Through Online Discovery: Lego Building

Meredith Farkas:

issue - lots of people don’t have access to continuing education programs
hands-on learning is important
online courses can be run cheaply

talked about Five Weeks to a Social Library:
had 40 participants, all kinds of libraries

tools used:
drupal - it allows multiple blogs, all in the same place, and static content, too
blip.tv
opal

lessons:
playing with technology is essential to learning [...]

Topeka’s Techie Toybox

I thought some of you might be interested in my library’s “techie toybox” that I have been purchasing over the summer. What is a techie toybox? In our case, it’s a bunch of gadgets, cameras, and the like that library staff can check out and, well, do stuff with. Here’s the list of gadgets (photos [...]

Teaching Managers about Emerging Trends

Here’s something I’m doing at my library right now, and thought I’d share. The managers at my library meet every week (I’m a manager, too). Part of that weekly meeting is “my time.” We’ve been calling it simply “Cool Stuff” - I usually do a short presentation on a Web 2.0 product or concept, or [...]

Becoming a Technology Agnostic

I recently read an article about technology change on Lucas McDonnell’s unCommon Knowledge blog. This is definitely worth a read - especially for IT managers and IT departments.
Why? Lucas says this: “the increasing pace of technology change requires us to be more innovative in how we both adopt and maintain technologies,” and then provides some [...]

Great Tips on Customer Service

From the LibTalk blog, The Determinants of Delight - this is a great article! Candi talks about how to delight library customers, and has a wonderful list of ways to accomplish this:

Smile
Be really nice, all the time
Get back to them as soon as possible
Limit the times you say no
Emphasize the positive
Speak their language
Go above and [...]

Yahoo Email Beta Training, or Adding Fun to Training

I have a Yahoo email account (honestly I don’t check it too often). But Trillian (IM client) sends little “reminder” messages to me once in awhile that I have mail in the inbox of my Yahoo account. So I decided to go clean it out today.
When I did, I was greeted with a chance to [...]

IL2006 Day 1: Technology Competencies: a path to training

Sarah Houghton-Jan - Librarian in Black spoke about technology competencies (and she’s writing a book on this. Cool).
Tech competencies are a list of things staff need to know…
How will competencies help?

job descriptions
evaluations
reveals training needs
addresses feelings of inequity
help staff adjust and handle change

Create a purpose statement. Why are you doing this?

this will help guide planning
explains process [...]

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